Foto: Sarah Skeen
Jake Adam York
1972 - 2012, West Palm Beach
Nacido en West Palm Beach, Florida, el 10 de agosto de 1972, Jake Adam York creció en Gadsden, Alabama. Recibió una licenciatura en Inglés de la Universidad de Auburn, y una maestría y doctorado en escritura creativa y literatura Inglés de la Universidad de Cornell.
Sus colecciones de poesía incluyen Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois Press, 2010); A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois Press, 2008), que ganó el Premio del Libro de Colorado; y Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005), que ganó el Premio Elixir.
Jake Adam York murió repentinamente el 16 de diciembre de 2012, a la edad de 40.
Publicaciones:
Abide (Southern Illinois Press, 2014)
Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois Press, 2010)
A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008)
Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005)
The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (Routledge, 2005)
Poemas:
Self-Portrait in the Town Where I Was Born at Verse Daily
A Natural History of Mississippi at Poetry Daily
Four poems on video at Southern Spaces
Four poems at Diode
Selections from A Map of the County at RealPoetik
Four poems at Blackbird
Three Poems at Cambell Corner
'Elegy for James Knox' at DIAGRAM
'Signal at DIAGRAM
'Interferometry' at Greensboro Review
Seven poems at H_NGM_N
'Legba Says' in Octopus
Three Poems at Terrain.org
Three Poems in Typo
'Radiotherapy' at Poetry 365
Two Poems at Shampoo Poetry
Revistas y ensayos:
'Recovery: Learning the Music of History' at Terrain.org
'The Marrow of the Bone of Contention' at storySouth, an Arts and Letters Daily 2003 article of note.
Diptongo
El aire de la noche se condensa despacio,
el calor de la tarde adelgaza con la madreselva,
apaciguando millones de trompetas de
sol tenue y frío.
Los zumbidos de la consola resuenan
a través de la antena. Luego, su silencio
reúne desde la oscuridad las voces
gélidas de los mirlos
Como el resplandor de la ciudad se aproxima
a la tormenta: Buenas noches, viaja tan lejos
con la onerosa sílaba, eléctrica
como las nuevas constelaciones en las noches
sin luna.
Tan extraña y difícil de encontrar
una vez que el disco ha aumentado,
su rostro inconcluso proyecta su
acento en todo.
Radioterapia
Debido a que vivían cerca de la señal de la torre,
su voltaje ronroneaba como la prédica de una iglesia
en el mismo centro del ruido.
El doctor irradia la Palabra de Dios
en el niño enfermo y recuerda
cada célula caída en el cuerpo injusto,
que oye todo, como en la noche y la
historia de la abuela.
Si se sujeta el cierre de la radio,
se puede oír el susurro muerto.
Después de que la madre había muerto,
sus hermanas trenzan las mechas de su cabello,
escuchan y discuten sobre cada sonido estático,
diciendo: Es hora de ir a la cama.
Ella comienza de nuevo.
A lo lejos alguien pide no más sufrimiento,
y la iglesia trabaja en su ronda,
tratando de comenzar algo nuevo,
pero lo único que se puede decir
es lo que se ha dicho antes,
viejas historias, oraciones antiguas.
Virga
Glifo seco
de esperanza y
falsas esperanzas.
Una columna responde
barrida por el calor
en su instantánea mitad.
Ver el suicidio como
un vacío que se ha ido.
La lluvia al final es
casi extraña al suelo,
como el niño a la gravedad.
Sensibilidad
a Mack Charles Parker, linchado cerca de Poplarville, Mississippi, 24 de abril, 1959, recuperado del Pearl River, 4 de mayo, 1959
Seis semanas desde que ese susurro se levantó
en la ventana de un escenario
detrás del bar Half Note,
susurro que Mingus dejó extender como un moretón,
Lester Young ha muerto, seis semanas
desde que cayó del cielo,
muerto fuera del avión de París,
y cada noche este adiós se
hace más sensible. Ahora
los planos se ocultaron, y Handy ha aprendido
a plegar el sonido de la respiración
dentro de sus notas –la garganta sangrante,
la última agitación de la lengua epiléptica–
mientras Mingus anima el bajo
en ondas de sonido y fallas
que ningún micrófono puede contener.
Los tragos tiemblan como el río
a mitad de camino de aquí a la tumba,
arrastrados por el viento o desplomándose,
tos de cuerdas bajo su mano,
y en la parte alta de la ciudad una cinta espera
los magnetos para decir esto otra vez,
un teletipo está escribiendo una historia
para el Times de mañana–
un cuerpo halado desde un río
en Mississippi, con sólo dedos
para un nombre. Aquí
sólo los tragos están oyendo
mientras Ervin se levanta, escribiendo el plomo de Handy,
e incluso no pueden oír
cómo los ríos curan su quietud,
cómo llenan sus cicatrices tan perfectamente
que recordar se siente como olvidar.
Entonces la respiración se fue.
La madera tararea un momento más largo,
y cada superficie se hace suave
hasta que los vidrios y las aguas
vuelven a ser de vidrio y dispuestos
para atrapar cada aplauso,
cada nota que cae.
© Traducción de Juan Carlos Villavicencio
en Persons Unknown, 2010
Sensitivity
for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959,
recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959
Six weeks since that whisper rose
into the window of a stage
behind the Half Note's bar,
whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise,
Lester Young is dead, six weeks
since he fell from the sky,
dead off the plane from Paris,
and each night this goodbye's
gone more sensitive. Now
the flats are hid, and Handy's learned
to fold the sound of breath
inside his notes—the bleeding throat,
tongue's last epileptic flutter—
while Mingus thrills the bass
in waves of sound and fail
no microphone can hold.
Drinks tremble like the river
halfway from here to the grave,
pulled by wind or plummet,
cough of strings beneath the hand,
and uptown a tape is waiting
for magnets to say this again,
a teletype is writing a story
for tomorrow's Times—
a body pulled from a river
in Mississippi, with only fingers
for a name. Here
only the drinks are listening
as Ervin rises, ghosting Handy's lead,
and even they cannot hear
how the rivers heal their quiet,
how they fill their scars so perfectly
that remember feels like forget.
Then the breath is gone.
The wood hums a moment longer,
and each surface smoothes
till the glasses and the waters
are glass again and ready
to catch each clap,
each note that falls.
"Sensitivity" from Persons Unknown. Copyright
City of Grace
Welcome to Jackson: City of Grace and Benevolence
City of Grace, you open,
you part your curtains
and smile like a hostess
when we call your name,
you tender what any traveler needs,
a call to ease, a balm,
a kindness, whatever storm.
You take us in. City of Grace
and Benevolence, you say
you know what solace means,
burned so often they called you
Chimneyville, and now
you can't forget,
you've written it in bronze
outside the City Hall
the War made a hospital
for the Yankee
and for your Rebel sons,
like the one who is always dying
outside the Capitol.
City of Fame,
you hold him still, laurel
on your crown, fan
making a hand of wind
to soothe his face
and fill the eagle's wings
spread above to promise,
Virtute et armis, to say again
just how far you'll go.
City of Remembrance,
you keep so well, you show us
where Welty lived,
the house still there, how she skated
to the library, through
the Capitol, the book
now cast and open in her hands.
Tell me now, City of Embrace,
of the newsreels' children
rounded from their march,
flags gathered, the children
trucked to the fairground cages,
the ones who peer out
through the chicken wire.
City of Richard Wright
and Ross Barnett, tell me
not just where the Governor pled
I love Mississippi, I love her people,
her customs, but where the writer
went to school, a short walk
from here, thinking it was not
until one wanted the world to be different
that one would look at the world
with will and emotion, and tell me,
then, where Medgar Evers lived,
whom you remember
with a post office and a stamp
and an airport, though
when I've asked you've turned
to someone else and said
Can you help this man find his friend?
•
Ambivalent City, you know the way,
but you let me find it, the statue,
the library, miles away,
the Boulevard, and then the house,
the plaque that tells us
this is where he lived, perfect
as a photograph, as a movie,
only the color's unreal,
or too real, the green piercing,
the hose uncoiled as if someone
might return to water the lawn.
Neighbors cruise, panning
like cameras as I stand
where he must have stood
choosing the house with no front door,
where Beckwith must have stood,
who drove the town asking everyone
where Evers lived, where
he marked his man.
There is nowhere else to stand.
A city is a kind of memory,
and if you stay too long
the shape of someone else
will hold you there
until day repeats its failure
and the streetlights wake
and yawn all color from the dusk
and the house becomes a photograph
of itself and the small wings
unfold from the fabric of night,
from all the magnolias' ears
and the broad stretch of the reservoir
and the river you can smell
as they gather into pearls
the stars' historic light,
the eyes' whose looking stays
long after the pupils
have burned away. Fireflies
fall back into the grass,
and the mayflies clasp each other
in a kind of halo. City of Ghosts,
you can't abandon your history,
and it won't abandon you.
You watch each other,
you call each other's names.
The sidewalks, the driveways
gleam like quarried moon,
and each open hand repeats
the ambient light as the crickets
fill with heat and raise again
the street's last breath:
Turn me loose.
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"City of Grace" from Persons Unknown.
Substantiation, part 1
And the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense. . . .
— Mamie Till, 1955
. . . with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. . . .
—Look, January 1956
The sheriff says it wasn't Till we pulled from the river,
that man was as white as I am, white as cotton
blowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down,
looked like he'd lain there weeks, not a kid at all.
He was a stranger just out of Money, recalled
by a store clerk, a hobo, and a crossroad guitarist.
The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing.
They say it's like the sheriff says, came up one night,
headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down,
right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says,
a plague of starlings gathered into little boys
those who fished and found the dead man's foot.
The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes.
He cannot find them, no matter where he looks.
"Substantiation, part 1" from A Murmuration of Starlings.
Letter Already Broadcast into Space
—To Sun Ra, from Earth
You are not here,
you are not here
in Birmingham,
where they keep your name,
not in Elmwood’s famous plots
or the monuments
of bronze or steel or the strew
of change in the fountain
where the firehoses sprayed.
In the furnaces, in the interchange sprawl
that covers Tuxedo Junction,
in the shopping malls, I think,
they’ve forgotten you,
the broadcast towers, the barbecues,
the statue of the Roman god,
spiculum blotting out
part of the stars.
To get it dark enough,
I have to fold back
into the hills, into the trees
where my parents
planted me, where the TV
barely reaches and I drift
with my hand on the dial
of my father’s radio,
spinning, too, the tall antenna
he raised above the pines.
I have to stand at the base
of the galvanized
pole I can use as an azimuth
and plot you in.
The hunter’s belt is slung again,
and you are there
in the pulse, in the light of
Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka,
all your different names,
you are there
in all the rearrangements
of the stars.
Come down now,
come down again,
like the late fall light
into the mounds along the creek,
light that soaks like a flood
to show the Cherokee sitting upright
underground, light
like the fire they imply.
Come down now
into the crease the freight train
hits like a piano’s hammer
and make the granite hum
beneath.
Come down now
as my hand slips from the dial,
tired again of looking
for the sound of another way
to say everything.
Come down now with your diction
and your dictionary.
Come down, Uncle, come down
and help me rise.
I have forgot my wings.
